A Comprehensive Collection - Swami Vivekananda

82 KARMA-YOGA.baby dies, or one in a thousand will, if at all,crawl overthe twenty miles to reach the end exhausted and \ialfdead. That is, curiously enough, what we generally ti$rto do with the world. All the men and women in anysociety are not of the same capacity. Each must havehis or her own different ideals, and we have no right tosneer at any ideal. Let every one do the best he can torealise his own ideal ;I should not be judged by yours, noryou by mine. The apple tree should not be judged by thestandard of the oak, nor the oak by that of the apple.To judge the apple tree you must take the apple standard,and for the oak there is its own standard, and so with allof us.Unity in variety is the plan of creation. Howevermen and women may vary individually, there is unity inthe background. The different individual characters andclasses of men and women are natural variations in the lawof creation. Hence we ought not to judge them by thesame standard, or put the same ideal before them. Such acourse creates only an unnatural struggle far other thanprofitable, and the result is that man begins to hate himselfand is hindered from becoming truly religious and good.In the Hindu system of morality we find that thisfact has been recognized from very ancient times ;and intheir scriptures and books on ethics different rules are laiddown for the different classes of men, as also for the householder, the Sannyasin (the man who has renounced theworld) and the student. The life of every individual inKarma, according to the Hindu scriptures, is divided intoseveral parts.The Hindu begins life as a student ;thenhe marries and becomes a householder ;then after becoming old he retires, and lastly he gives up the world andbecomes a Sannyasin. To each of these stages of life certain